The Ninth Day of Gifts – Dave Wessling - Symbolism

Dave Wessling, my teacher for a number of high school English classes, has been mentioned several times. He was unlike any teacher I had before or after. As a former basketball player, he had an imposing physical presence coupled with a booming voice he used to great effect in the classroom.

Outside class, he’d seek to engage us intellectually on educational topics. While later appreciating these interactions, back then it seemed unfair for a teacher to talk about school outside class time. It smacked too much of unpaid overtime for us!

Mr. Wessling offered a number of educational gifts relative to both literature and broader life endeavors. One concept was explicating literary works to uncover their underlying meanings and symbolism. Until then, I’d simply taken fictional works at face value, displaying more interest in biographies than short stories, novels, poetry, or plays.

Under Mr. Wessling’s tutelage, however, I embraced symbolism and multiple interpretations within great literary pieces and other works, including art, which was of even greater interest to me. I began applying the concept of symbolism in creative writing and art projects. It extended as far as the menu design for my parent’s restaurant; the menu started displaying a variety of images and cryptic messages signaling my life view at any particular time.

Based on my early business writing experiences, you’d think symbolic expression would be a thing of the past. Later, however, as I came to appreciate the importance of emotion in live business interactions and events, symbolism’s importance emerged once again. The lessons Dave Wessling gave us in school made it easy to successfully embrace the concept in a new setting.

So go to school on this lesson and share your thoughts about where you could use symbolism more effectively in business to create richer understanding of the concepts you’re trying to communicate.

BTW - To catch up on all the gifts posts so far for this season, click here.

Change Your Character – Training as the Best Teachers Do

We can all recall great school teachers who made otherwise boring subjects come alive and taught lessons that shape us still.

We’re all teachers in our own ways. There are people that we work and interact with daily who look to us for both technical learning and life lessons. Let’s explore great teachers’ approaches and see what they can teach us about our teaching roles. Great teachers:

• Present challenging concepts
• Are passionate about their subject(s)
• Use vivid stories to illustrate lessons
• Ask you about the subject area even outside the class room
• Are true to the principles they teach
• Teach heuristics to master & use the content
• Make complex topics understandable
• Are interactive
• Make learning fun and rewarding
• Don’t simply give answers away for the asking
• Are still actively learning themselves
• Have a love for the material / topic
• Adapt to students’ various learning styles

Identify three new ideas for each of the approaches above that you can adapt to become a better teacher to those around you. Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Today’s Get ‘Er Written Approach – This involved taking an idea and shifting it. I originally planned to do something specifically on the Montessori approach (which may still show up someday), but couldn’t get it to work. The focus then shifted to teachers in general and some of the great educators that I’ve had the honor to learn from during my schooling.

This post is dedicated to Dave Wessling, for so many reasons. May he rest in peace.

BrainzoomingTM - Cool Isn't Always Enough

Dave Wessling, one of my all-time most influential teachers, shared many comments that have shaped my thinking in so many ways. One that’s particularly relevant recently is, “Form should reinforce meaning.” It’s a great rule to apply when developing and assessing creative material against an underlying strategy.

The principle basically challenges you to consider everything (i.e., color, position, sequence, pacing, volume, length, vocabulary, position, shape, movement, tonality, etc.) surrounding a communications message (the form) relative to how strongly it supports the meaning of the message being conveyed. Substitute “creative” for “form” and “strategy” for “meaning” and you have a maxim you can use over and over again:

“Creative should reinforce strategy.”

You’ll never go wrong applying this principle in business, and particularly in marketing decision making. It’s especially helpful in an environment where people are advancing interesting, intriguing, even cool creative ideas that have little to do with any underlying strategic foundation.

Asking if the creative reinforces the strategy at the appropriate time (i.e., during a specific evaluation period and NOT during a divergent thinking exercise), will lead to making better strategic decisions and producing messages with stronger impacts.